excessive obligations. Their communities suffered population losses and many villages disappeared altogether. The serf labor force was displaced and their plots taken over under estate consolidation schemes (to further increase the already dominant folwark portion of the rural economy), or manorial duties were replaced by feudal rent arrangements if that seemed more profitable to landlords. Those and many other measures amounting to extreme exploitation and imposition of hardship had not resulted in increased production, but rather made the crisis more acute by ruining the peasant farming operation. Not all the regions suffered equally, as northern Poland's (Gdańsk Pomerania and Greater Poland) agriculture maintained moderate profitability, while southern Poland (Lesser Poland) experienced the greatest rural decline, and correspondingly the greatest decrease in the percentage of farms under peasant family hereditary holding. After the Khmelnytsky Uprising and the Swedish Deluge, approx. 35% of villages in Royal Prussia and 60% in Podolia were destroyed completely. The tendency was for each village, or a small cluster of villages, possibly corresponding to a parish, to function as a self-contained organism, arbitrarily ruled by the lord's administrator, with some participation from local self-government, whose continuous existence depended on its degree of cooperativeness. The parish schools taught mostly the catechism with added social indoctrination. The one allowed peasant activity, sometimes even required because of mandatory purchases of such staples as beer form the lord's brewery, was the participation in village tavern life. The taverns provided some entertainment, functioned as outlets for significant folk artistic creativity, and places of occasional contacts with traveling representatives of the largely unknown to the peasants, outside world. Average living conditions in the increasingly impoverished rural villages were very bad and the exploited peasants resorted to various forms of resistance, most often running away from particularly abusive landlords. Some villages or areas engaged in collectively refusing to perform the prescribed duties, or, rarely in ethnically Polish lands, armed rebellions. The Kostka-Napierski Uprising took place in 1651, there were rebellions in the Podhale region in 1670 and in other regions in 1735–38. In Silesia the ethnically Polish peasantry rebelled during 1722–29 and in 1750 around Pszczyna, when the Prussian army was brought to bear. Highway robbery band activity was another form of peasant resistance; some of its leaders, especially from mountainous regions, have become immortalized in folk tales. On a grand scale peasant armed resistance became a crucial factor in the eastern Ruthenian lands